23 February 2011

The Pacific Ocean was gonna-kill-ya stop gorgeous today. I couldn't stop. But it was a mind blower. I don't know how to describe how you should fix this in your mind to get the perfect vision of it, but try blasting some sidelong sunshine on it and get it kinda shimmery and you should be as close as we can possibly go. It was the darkest of teal on the tending-to-blue side and only going vaguely greener nearest the shore. The whitecaps had been to the dentist for one of those laser whitening jobs or something. I can't see so good, see? So when I tell you it was this outrageously gorgeous and clear and intense, THINK how much the more so it would have been for a sighted person! Holy bat guano. To. Die. For.

No. Really.

It would've been just fine to drive off a cliff into it. It would've been cosmic. Rad. The only way to fly.

I thought it was gonna be over when I had to head inland north of Westport over the Coast Range to hit 101, and I almost just turned around to grab Peggy and Jim and sit out there and STARE at it till we all died of starvation or peed our pants, but I kept driving like a good girl who does what she's supposed to. There were clods of snow by the sides of the highway up at the summit. So then I hit 101 and saw the Eel and the Mattole are teal too, but not as neonly teal yet. THAT comes later in the spring. The redwoods were in fine shape and when I finally got to the ocean again—I'll be damned—it was still that shocking teal. Soon, though the overcast made it just gray. It's ALWAYS overcast around Eureka. But then the sun was back out north of Eureka and the ocean electric teal with RAINBOWS everywhere. This didn't last that long because the sun was going too far down. What came next was a sort of matte-looking polished silver ocean with just the faintest hint of baby blue to it. THAT looked like it had to be Tiamat reborn. It looked like something in a science fiction masterpiece. Then the road started me back up the coastal mountainside and some more clods of snow, and the Trinity Alps off in the distance were totally white, so I took the Newton P. Drury Scenic Parkway to miss what I was positive was going to be icy freeway up there on the new bypass over the summit. STILL, when connecting back onto 101 much lower down than the summit, more clods of snow by the side of the road.

They told me at the grocery store it's supposed to snow again tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I think we are close enough to tomorrow already because I'm gonna have to cave on my all-doors-and-windows-open-to-the-elements-thumb-my-nose-at-the-power-company gig. My fingertips are ten little ice cubes already....

maybe this will search

or roam around in my weekly archive

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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.—John F. Kennedy

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.—Ronald Reagan

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.—Martin Luther King

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war. The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of “their” government, are facilitating this outcome.—Paul Craig Roberts

I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court.—Cynthia McKinney

No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."—Chris Floyd

The power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below.—Howard Zinn

...the government only starts listening to its voters once the more corrupt option turns out to be untenable.—Matt Taibbi

· One out of seven American homeowners will probably lose their homes by the end of 2010.

· Only 4.7 percent of distressed homeowners who enrolled in the modification plan have gotten any help.

· Out of Obama's $75 billion program, only $2.3 million has been spent—or 0.03 percent.

Obama's performance on the foreclosure crisis—along with unemployment, the biggest problem America faces—makes Bush's laissez faire approach to Hurricane Katrina look caring and loving in comparison. If ever there were a cause for impeachment, look no further.—Ted Rall

As self-appointed champions of civilisation against barbarism, they fail to see that a certain barbarism is the flipside of civilisation itself, inseparable from its smooth operation. For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every artistic masterpiece, human wretchedness and back-breaking toil.—Terry Eagleton

Here at home and throughout the world people are fighting back against the forces of wealth, privilege, and militarism — some because they have no choice, others because they would choose no other course but the one that leads to peace and justice.—Michael Parenti